The Real Lincoln Bedroom: Love in a Time of Strife

Turf issues are critical for any writer with the temerity to take on the Lincoln story. There are so many Lincoln books that there is even a book wholly devoted to listing the Top 100 books on the subject.

The Lincoln chronicle is so long and complex that most writers choose some single area on which to concentrate. So there are books on Lincoln’s depression, on his Christianity, on his career in law, on his assassin and on his cabinet. (This last, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” remains the most accessible and inventive recent work of Lincoln scholarship.)

There are also books on the Lincoln family, starting with the peculiar character of Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s ambitious, unstable and hard-shopping wife. And now there is “The Lincolns,” Daniel Mark Epstein’s careful parsing of the Lincoln marriage.

Scholarly specificity demands that Mr. Epstein begin this book with the 1842 reunion of the lovers after a long, mysterious separation and then extend it from their impetuous wedding on Nov. 4, 1842 (“I want to get hitched tonight,” the future president told a parson that morning), to Lincoln’s murder on April 14, 1865.

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The Lincolns offers some new views of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln.Credit
Associated Press

Given this relative simplicity of focus Mr. Epstein might have extracted the story of the marriage from its larger historical context. But Lincoln scholars seem acutely aware of one another’s comprehensiveness. And in this field of expertise it would take a very brave writer to champion brevity. So “The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage” is a longish but fascinating interweaving of the crisis-filled, mercurial career of Abraham Lincoln with an equally rocky tale of man and wife.

One of Mr. Epstein’s primary goals, it seems, is to break with convention when it comes to the story of the Lincolns’ stormy domesticity. He takes a more generous, warmblooded view of this union than most biographers do. He appreciates the early attraction between the two of them, the sustained intimacy that lasted long into their lives together and the fond, even frolicsome nature of their shared communication.

Mr. Epstein is also mindful of the image-consciousness that they shared, a matter inadvertently underscored by this book’s cover image. It shows the Lincolns together, but it is a synthesis of two separate images; they always resisted being photographed together because of the great discrepancy in height between them. The president would joke about this as “the long and the short of it.”

“The Lincolns” relies less on new information than on a thoughtful, sometimes even presumptuous examination of existing material. For instance Mr. Epstein surmises that the abrupt hiatus in the couple’s courtship reflected Lincoln’s fear that he had contracted syphilis, rather than ascribing this breakup to Lincoln’s doubts about his love for Mary Todd.

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Daniel Mark EpsteinCredit
Jennifer Bishop

If anything, according to this book, he loved her too much to marry her in 1840, not too little. She was described at that time, after all, as “the very creature of excitement” and “one who could make a bishop forget his prayers.”

There is even some novelty in Mr. Epstein’s willingness to write about Mary — or Molly, as her husband called her — as a mesmerizing creature rather than a harridan in the latter part of the marriage. Even after the Lincolns had been battered by the deaths of two sons and the immense public pressure of the presidency, he asserts, they were closely bound by Mary’s enduring (if sometimes troublemaking) involvement in her husband’s political career.

The three-dimensional quality of “The Lincolns” is all the more remarkable because firsthand material about the marriage is sparse. So not a letter between them goes unexamined here.

The tone of the correspondence can be surprising, particularly when Mr. Epstein emphasizes its discreet but distinct erotic charge. When Mary signed an 1848 letter “With love” and then pointedly crossed out those words, he sees a sign not of hostility (the rest of the letter is chatty and fond) but of frustration and desire. She was without love because they were living apart, she in Kentucky with her family and he in Washington as a young member of the House of Representatives. And she wrote teasingly as part of the Lincolns’ tug of war over when, how and at what cost they would be together.

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Despite the impression that Mary Lincoln was a crazy spendthrift and that her husband was a model of probity, Mr. Epstein finds evidence of a shared conversational interest. (“Very soon after you went away,” he wrote her, also in 1848, “I got what I think a very pretty set of shirt-bosom studs — modest little ones, jet, set in gold, only costing 50 cents a piece, or $1.50 for the whole.”) And when “The Lincolns” dwells on such small matters, it integrates into a fully formed larger portrait. Mary’s mad escalation to the heedless purchasing of $1,000 shawls (at a time when that was the cost of a carriage) reflects the overall despair, frustration and combativeness that the weight of a wartime presidency inflicted on both adult Lincolns.

Even when Mr. Epstein oversteps, he does it interestingly. This book probably did not need housekeeping details extracted from popular domestic manuals of the era.

But “The Lincolns” is valuable for its exacting evocation of the 19th-century household. (Cold water, the president’s favorite beverage, was something of a delicacy.) And when he reads much into Lincoln’s borrowing of books by Goethe from the Library of Congress as his son Willie lay dying and his wife’s influence peddling had damaged the presidency, Mr. Epstein does have reason to guess that Faust’s pact with the Devil may have been on Lincoln’s mind.

It is clear from “The Lincolns” that Mr. Epstein brings something of an outsider’s perspective to the hothouse world of Lincoln scholarship. (Among his other works are seven volumes of poetry and a biography of Nat King Cole.) It is also clear that this is not his first go-round in the realm of Lincolniana. (He has already written a full Lincoln biography.)

But his decision to zero in on the Lincolns’ life together proves a quirkily rewarding one. This book is written with insight fresh enough to penetrate some of the absurd solemnity that constitutes Lincoln lore. After all, upon the death of Willie Lincoln there was a reporter who, in Mr. Epstein’s words, “brightly commented,” “The embalmment was a complete success, and gave great satisfaction to all present.”

THE LINCOLNS

Portrait of a Marriage

By Daniel Mark Epstein

Illustrated. 559 pages. Ballantine Books. $28.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Real Lincoln Bedroom: Love in a Time of Strife. Today's Paper|Subscribe